Baby Girl Monster Hunter

So after I finished college I started hunting monsters. Well—that’s not the entire story. First I got a temp job. But when I figured it wouldn’t put a ding in my debts, I stole the office’s mega-stapler and started hunting monsters. That’s the entire story.

My parents were like . . . shit.

They had rigid brains. Their point of comparison was my brother Dorkass (not his given name), a developmental psychologist who wowed them with retroactive criticism of their parenting. When he stopped by for holidays, they couldn’t really imagine their baby girl stalking grimy slimy lemon-limeys.

They couldn’t imagine me, sweatsoaked in the jungle, rocking the natives’ warpaint. The spearmint scent of a hunt unraveling among the brush like a ball of yarn, threaded through my nostrils like a septum piercing. Me, baby girl, peeling back a venetian frond and seeing—for the first and only time—a cryobaboon.

Can you imagine? My parents couldn’t. They would’ve lost their baby boomer minds to see its albino coat. Its icicle whiskers. The soil of the rainforest, thin and loose, tundrifying beneath his cryobutt. Frostbitten fruit all around. And me, seven-foot stapler locked, materializing from the foliage. Flipping my weapon to its blunt side and meeting his gaze. Bashing unabashedly at his shrunken, vulnerable testes, as he breathes his last chilly puffs.

They had a much easier time imagining Dorkass, feet on the dining room table, elucidating why he and I would’ve been better off with two daddys. Just to shift the conversation, I would try to say something like, “You know, Mom, there’s no such thing as a small monster. I once wound up astride a desert. . . ” But they would only roll their eyes and ask when I was going to run out of staples.

To date I’ve corpsed seventeen colossi, cretaceonids, and chthonianisms. You can always tell they’re mine by the lethal, crooked ladders running up their sides.

•••

"Kitty" by Nicholas Shea

My first job was for my landlord, and it was bad. Though not “rats in the basement” bad. We had this mangy-ass stray cat lurking around the property because someone kept slipping it lunchmeat. He paid me thirty dollars to wait in the parking lot and bag it up. This was before I stole my office’s mega-stapler.

I spent the afternoon in the shade of the building, reading a newspaper and counting bricks. When I saw the cat on the fire escape, I went up after it with a can of tuna, which had no pull-tab. I had to beat it open on the handrail. The landlord impounded the cat, and now I think it’s dead. But it wasn’t me that killed it.

My first real job was for a small suburb at the edge of rurality. I told my parents that I was going to spend the weekend with a friend, but this friend lived at the foot of a volcano, and if they didn’t hear back from me ever again then that was why.

Trail dust

Leaving Maricopa

Driving to Tucson, I-10
tires could melt at any second,
gluing the car to the asphalt.
Around me, the dead are rising
from across the oranges, browns, purples, desert.
Zuni chiefs, from their cliff-side pueblos,
curse this foreigner cruising through their home,
top down and sweating like hell.
Dead cowboys, lost travelers,
Tom Mix, white as a ghost and his
double decapitation.
They vanish at the city limits,
falling back into their dust and sand.

by William Brent Wright

 "Prairie Magic" by Colleen Burner

In the attic

When I got home from work and found only my mother, she told me that my father had turned into a sparrow and had joined the others making a mess in the attic’s drafts and rafters. She had caught him in a plastic basket and was keeping him trapped there, fluttering and frantic, with a large leather-bound atlas to cover the top. The poor thing bore no resemblance to my father, but I fixed my mother a cup of chamomile tea and put her to bed early, my hand resting on her dear, troubled head until she fell asleep. Then I took the basket up to the attic and switched the bird out for the right one. My mother’s eyesight had never been good.

by Kara McKeever

 

Slide 5, by Leanna Sparks

Draining time

The Draining
After Kim Addonizio

I take the blade out of its package,
my hand trembling, though determined
as it rises towards the meringue
on my face, once gelatinous now lathered
and flooding my nostrils, a medicinal mint.
The chemical trails tickle my nose hairs
causing me to stifle back a choking cloud—
then I spray histamine upon the mirror.
I’ve anointed my chin with a slice of blood.
On the vanity sits a roll of toilet paper,
and I tear off small pieces & curses,
dotting my face like the wings of a ladybug.
As the patches saturate to red from white,
I remove & replace the obscenity of my face—
leaving my brain empty & spiraled,
the same as my drained tube of toothpaste.

by Allan M. Jones

"On the Clock"

by Nicholas Shea

Words and image

              "And Lo, I Forgot What I Came Up Here For"

by Colleen Burner**

Mind

Tiantong Rujing, amid the tumultuous clacking
of a bamboo forest during a thunderstorm:
“Ten thousand hands, clapping
for this spectacle staged by the gods!”

The diva, Mme Brillant, in the resounding applause
of a standing audience after her solo:
“As fickle as temperamental gods—
and their clapping the only assurance!”

by Stephen E. Childress 


**More of Colleen Burner's hand-made collages can be seen at http://www.frenchforgluing.com or http://www.frenchforgluing.tumblr.com Prints of these babies are available for sale through an online shop: http://society6.com/FrenchForGluing.